The Cyborg’s Story
Danielle de Valera
Copyright Danielle de Valera 2015
The Cyborg’s Story
Cover and story glyphs by C S McClellan
All rights reserved. No part may be reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
If you would like to do any of the above, please seek permission first by contacting the author at
[email protected] ISBN 978-9942745-0-2
Published in the United States by Old Tiger Books.
First published in Australia in Aurealis, Issue No. 24, September 1999.
Cover image by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, 1833-1898, British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Glyph by C S McClellan from a detail of Aubrey Beardsley’s “The Platonic Lament”, one of his illustrations for Salome by Oscar Wilde, 1894.
Table of Contents
Story start
Halfway
Last scene
More stories in this series
About the author
Other works by this author
The Cyborg’s Story
It was my job to watch, not to intervene. Bodyguards were rare on Earth in 2175, but Thurston must’ve figured the experiment of a lifetime needed protection—or maybe he just wanted a witness, I don’t know.
I watched on the monitor as he ushered her into the office. She was fragile and beautiful, very much the dancer. Her thick, rich hair fell down to her waist. It was the colour of ripe maize. I sat in the cubicle, watching, listening.
Thurston was speaking with an undertone of excitement in his voice. “What you’re suggesting is incredibly dangerous, and the procedure would be irreversible. If I were inclined to do it, which I’m not.” He leaned back in the antique wooden chair he insisted on using and looked at her over the top of his spectacles; he wouldn’t wear lenses. “You mightn’t survive the operation.”
The afternoon sunlight shone in through the stained glass windows of the old one’s study. I could see the dancer analysing the patterns they made on the floor—or was she analysing her chances?
Thurston pulled a pipe from his pocket and began to stuff it with the coarsely ground tobacco leaves that he bought on the black market and kept in a worn, round tin in the second drawer of his desk. An ancient habit, nicotine, so out of date and fashion that this alone would have revealed his great age. The dancer waited in silence. Soon the smoke reached her from across the desk, and I think she adjusted her sensors.
“What about your wings?” Thurston asked suddenly, as if he wished to catch her off guard. But it seemed she had prepared herself for this.
“They’d have to go,” she said simply.
Thurston shook his head. He was a small man with light bones, blue eyes and thick, silver-grey hair. His clothes were old-fashioned. He was considered eccentric. But he was the Director of Genetic Engineering and had been for more than twenty years.
“Come now, Azuria,” he said.
So that was her name.
“What made you decide to come to me?” he continued.
Azuria smoothed a fold of her cream-coloured robe. All flyers wore robes; there was a particular colour for each profession. Winged dancers always wore cream.
“I know you can do it.” Her voice was soft and clear, graceful as her robe. “I think I’ve always known.”
The old guy busied himself with some papers—another one of his weird habits: papers. I noticed his fine, blue-veined hands tremble slightly and I read in him an undercurrent of something I couldn’t define.
The dancer was easy. She came straight to the point, and I wondered if she was malfunctioning. She was asking him to make her human. If he was considering this, no wonder he wanted a bodyguard with a top security clearance. No wonder he’d made me the offer he had.
I spoke into my headpiece. May I remind you, sir, that under Federation law the penalty for what she is proposing is death. For you and for her.
Thurston rubbed his ear. He shifted another paper to acknowledge my message. He let Azuria think her proposal had surprised him. Yet he had known her request in advance. Why else had he asked for my services?
“You’re the best winged dancer in the five districts.” The tone of his voice invited her to confide in him. “Now why would you want to give that up?”
She lied. How do I know she lied? It’s my business. I’m an INFJ, an old term but still valid. My intuition levels are way above the norm and my judgements are ninety-three point five per cent correct. That’s the best you can buy, which is why old Thurston picked me, no doubt.
I inhaled two crushed crystals of off-world Blue Monday and watched her lie. Whatever she hoped to gain by persuading Thurston, she wanted very badly. The light passed from the stained glass windows, and still they talked. She strung words together like strands of pearls.
And in the end, the old man nodded his head.
“She’s lying,” I told him after she’d gone.
Thurston’s blue eyes took on a steely glint. “Your people can’t lie, Michael. It’s not in their genetic programming.”
I sat in a wrap-around and watched her coming out of the anaesthetic. Thurston had a reputation for genius. Now I saw why.
Azuria looked ... human. It was more than the absence of wings. Something indefinable—the glow—was gone from her.
We were in an old stone cottage in the country in the Western District. In the back garden were trees, some of which were in bloom, and high in the late afternoon sky my people were wheeling, amusing themselves as they always did at the end of the day.
Thurston followed Azuria’s gaze to the open window. He waved the medical droids away and ran a hand through his silver hair, betraying a rare agitation.
“Azuria,” he said, “this is Michael. He’s a security expert. He’ll be with you for the duration of your project.”
She looked frightened.
“My dear,” the old fox said, “you must see the need for total security.”
I watched her eyes wander again to the open window.
“Michael will live with you and work with you,” Thurston went on. “He’ll be on hand at all times. To protect your interests, as it were.” He smiled thinly. “We’ll pass him off as your assistant.”
I got to my feet and smiled at her. “Love your hair.”
Azuria put a hand to her head. “My hair! What have you done to my hair?”
It was now black, darker even than my own, and cropped short in the current fashion of female science execs I’d glimpsed in the corridors of power.
The professor shot me a look that’d melt metal. “All right, all right,” he said to her. “So I changed your hair, and your face a little. You were very famous.” He began to walk about the room, searching for his aerokeys, which he’d left on the shelf above the antique fireplace.
“I’ve arranged for you to become research assistant to Dr William Elliott, as you requested. His research facilities are three miles from here. You’ll commence as soon as you’re fully recovered.” He’d found the keys. Now he paused in the doorway. “I leave you in good hands. Michael here will brief you on your new identity; there’s a file in the computer. Relax. Michael has all the instructions.”
He neglected to tell her that my instructions included a weekly report on her For His Eyes Only, and that what I couldn’t get by being there I was to get out of her in other ways—if necessary, by surveillance.
“One other thing,” he said to her. “I’ve built in the reproductive system. As you requested. You’ll have normal, female hormonal fluctuations, but remember this—are yo
u listening?”
Her eyes had strayed to the window again. Night had fallen while he was speaking. High in the sky, wearing lightbands around their heads, my people looked like characters out of an ancient fairy tale.
Thurston went on. “You must never become pregnant. Bear that in mind, Azuria, and take the appropriate precautions.”
He was gone. I went over to the wall unit and punched out a drink. I wondered why he’d given her a reproductive system if using it was going to kill her. Sexual differentiation we’d always had: some of us ended up as personal companions. But reproductive systems?
No. We were not a species.
Azuria had fallen back into sleep. I pressed off the bedside lamp and sat in the darkness, watching her. A medical droid hovered in, examined her smoothly, expertly.
“She will not wake again tonight, master.”
“Stay with her.” I dropped my robe and pulled on a bodysuit. Then I snapped a lightband around my forehead and joined my people out in the dark moonless sky.
She was now, according to the files, Dr Azure Eastman, computer big wheel, and I was her assistant with a security clearance from the president himself. As a result of The Thirty Year Fear, my people were banned from working in the top levels of any of the scientific disciplines, and wings were built into our DNA so that the ban could be easily enforced. So my clearance was necessary.
Az passed for human without a hitch. The stiffness of her gait we put down to a recent aero accident, and as time went by it disappeared altogether.
Dr William Elliott was Director of Psychology for the Western District. He was thirty-five, tall and gangling, with deep-set dark eyes and an IQ in the human population’s top one per cent. He’d been hunched over a computer since the age of two. Now he verged on being a sensana, with few social skills and no ability to make conversation that was not directly related to facts.
Az took absurd pains getting ready for work each morning. She agonised over her clothing. Still Elliott didn’t know she was on the planet. Every morning he turned his head from the monitor he was working at, flashed her a smile that never reached his eyes, and that was it.
In the area of computers, humans had it hard compared with flyers. They could not, as flyers could, interface with the main computer, thus saving what might amount to months if the data was complicated. The psychology department was underfunded and overworked, and Elliott was exhausted all the time. I figured Az’s chances of getting his attention were close to zero.
Which was fine with me. Sensanas are bad news.
Two moons went by. Then Azuria began to work late. At first I stayed back with her, but computechnology is not for me. Once I was certain Elliott wasn’t staying back, too, I went home at the usual hour like everyone else, ensconcing myself in front of the VR machine with a steady supply of Blue Monday, the complete video collection of Azuria’s past triumphs, and an ache I couldn’t quite explain. How could a stranger have become so dear to me?
And so I missed the cues.
The first time Az stayed back she couldn’t get out of bed the next morning. She retched intermittently for seventy-two hours, then she was her normal self again. When we returned to work, Elliott made a great fuss of her. He even hugged her. Then he dumped reams of computer printout onto her desk, telling her to take as much time off as she liked afterwards but to get him results the way she’d done before, and once again he said, “You’re brilliant!”
I’d never seen him so animated. But then, he was talking about work.
By the time Az had done this two more times, she was in bed for a week after each occasion, and Thurston, hearing of Elliott’s sudden breakthrough, came boiling onto the videophone.
“You fool!” he shouted. Behind him in the VF screen I could see the same stained glass patterns that had been reflected on the floor all those moons ago. “You fool, don’t you realise what she’s doing? She’s interfacing with the main computer. Her system won’t stand it. She’s no use to me dead! Stop her, Michael, see to it!”
I relayed the professor’s message to Azuria in softer hues.
“It’s all right,” she said, “I’ve finished. I’m sorry if I got you into trouble, Michael, but I got what I wanted.”
Then she told me: just before I’d arrived home from work that day, Elliott had called in to the cottage to see her, something he had never done before. He was high on the breakthrough her figures had given him.
He asked her out.
In the past, Az told me, out for her had always meant that her company would be entertaining somewhere that night, dancing and flying in one of the five huge theatres with their high ceilings and strangely decorated surrounds.
Standing in the wings, listening to the overture, she’d run a last-minute comb through her long gold hair. She always danced with it loose. It was for her a prop as important as the costume itself. Even the maître de danse, an eminent authority on arcane dancing, gave up and allowed her to perform with her hair unbound. It paid off, he knew. The public loved it. Besides, it wasn’t good for the company to have such a disturbance as Az could create when she didn’t get her way.
“Ah, Azuria 27,” the maître had said to her one night as they were waiting in the wings for their cue to go on, “there’s a flaw in you somewhere. Watch out for it. Some day it will be your undoing.”
She’d laughed when she told me this, but I knew what the dance master had meant. There was something strange about Azuria. Something different.
Out had another connotation. It meant the flying my people did every evening just on dusk. Again, Az said, she’d worn her hair loose. She liked the feeling of the wind whipping through it.
Most flyers liked to fly high, just below the domestic airlanes and well above the billboards. Az liked to fly low. She had, she told me, an obsession about gardens. Old-fashioned ones with rose bushes were her favourites. She’d come down neatly between one bush and another, snatch a rose, push off with the foot she was balancing on and be gone, all in a matter of seconds. Later, she said, she’d take the rose back to her compartment and put it in water, if the flight home hadn’t torn off all its petals.
One evening, a wind came up unexpectedly. After she’d snatched the flower she wanted and went to push off into the deepening sky, she’d found that her hair was caught on a tall rose bush. As she stood there, struggling to free her hair and becoming more entangled in the process, Elliott came out from the back of his house and cut her loose with a pair of scissors.
He couldn’t have been as worn out as he was when I met him for he made a lasting impression on Az. She found out who he was, then she went to Thurston. That was the beginning of it all, of the strange, unnatural life she was now leading.
Thurston was very pleased with this report. “She told you all that? Good work, Michael, good work.”
I accompanied Az the night she went out with Elliott. I went with the second-in-charge of his department, a woman called Helena, who fancied me. She’d had her face done over the previous week to look like the Mona Lisa.
I wasn’t interested.
The home of the Director General of Science was set on a hill with a commanding view of the countryside. It was built in the old style, of stone and glass, and furnished with every luxury a human could attain. In her gown of clinging gold mesh, sheath-like and slender, the new Azuria was a shock to both of us in the ornate, wall-sized mirrors, her black hair looking to me like some kind of ill omen.
The head droid led us to a table for four. We helped ourselves from a selection of drinks on a tray held by an impeccably clad android, which hovered unobtrusively nearby.
“You should enjoy the entertainment this evening,” Elliott said to us as we were finishing the elaborate dinner.
I doubted it. Humans weren’t much good at entertaining themselves anymore. In just four generations, their sport and performing arts had fallen into decay. Who could compete with a flyer programmed especially for the purpose? Still, there were pockets of resista
nce.
The Director General, Elliott continued, possessed a stage almost as large as the Great Hall’s. He indicated the red velvet curtain that covered one end of the gigantic dining room. The Director General had engaged a company of dancers for the night.
“Flyers?” I asked cautiously.
“They’re human,” Elliott replied.
Just then the lights dimmed, the orchestra struck up and the dancers came on. Elliott indicated the soloist he wanted us to see: a small girl, very dainty, with neat, clean footwork and good elevation. For a human.
She had long, ash-blonde hair, which she wore free in the style Az had made famous.
I got through the show by drinking everything the android had on its tray so that it had to excuse itself and go for more, and planning a paper on sensitive analytic personalities—sensanas. How did they do it? I wondered. How did they know just where to put the knife?
After the show, the girl Elliott had indicated came uninvited to our table and sat down. She was a personal friend, he said as he introduced us, “going back,” he said, “to childhood.”
The girl smiled at us. Her name was Cassie. “We went to school together,” she said, still watching Elliott. “Our mothers are old friends.”
The Mona Lisa made much of her. But I could see that the kind of personal history that Cassie had just expounded, and with which Az could never compete, distressed her.
“Azure’s a computer genius,” Elliott went on, oblivious of the angst on our side of the table. “She’s the one responsible for my breakthrough happening as fast as it did.”
Cassie smiled at Az with her honest grey eyes. She hitched the loose wrap that covered her costume back onto her shoulders. “I’d love to do something academic but it isn’t possible. There’s no time when you’re a dancer.”
“Tell me about it,” Az said in an undertone.